Tag Archives: funding bias

I have had an unexpectedly busy couple of weeks talking about declines in insect populations. Back in November of last year I wrote a blog about the sudden media interest in “Insect Armageddon” and followed this up with a more formal Editorial in Annals of Applied Biology at the beginning of the year (Leather, 2018). I mused at the time if this was yet another media ‘storm in a teacup’ but it seems that the subject is still attracting attention. I appeared on television as part of TRT World’s Roundtable programme and was quoted quite extensively in The Observer newspaper on Sunday last talking about insect declines since my student days 🙂 At the same time, as befits something that has been billed as being global, a similar story, featuring another veteran entomologist appeared in the New Zealand press.

The TV discussion was quite interesting, the panel included Nick Rau from Friends of the Earth, Lutfi Radwan, an academic turned organic farmer, Manu Saunders from Ecology is Not a Dirty Word and me. If they had hoped for a heated argument they were out of luck, we were all pretty much in agreement; yes insects did not seem to be as abundant as they had once been, and this was almost certainly a result of anthropogenic factors, intensive agriculture, urbanisation and to a lesser extent climate change. Unlike some commentators who firmly point the finger at the use of pesticides as the major cause of the declines reported, we were more inclined to towards the idea of habitat degradation, fragmentation and loss. We also agreed that a big problem is a lack of connection with Nature by large sections of the population, and not just those under twenty. We also felt very strongly that governments should be investing much more into research in this area and that we desperately need more properly replicated and designed long-term studies to monitor the undeniable changes that are occurring. I had, in my Editorial and an earlier blog post, mentioned this point and lamented the paucity of such information, so was pleasantly surprised, to receive a couple of papers from Sebastian Schuh documenting long-term declines in Hemiptera and Orthoptera in Germany (Schuh et al., 2012ab), although of course sad, to see yet more evidence for decreasing insect populations.

The idea that insects are in terminal decline has been rumbling on for some time; more than a decade ago Kelvin Conrad and colleagues highlighted a rapid decline in moth numbers (Conrad et al., 2006) and a few years later, Dave Brooks and colleagues using data from the UK Environmental Change Network revealed a disturbing decline in the numbers of carabid beetles across the UK (Brooks et al., 2012). In the same year (2012) I was asked to give a talk at a conference organised by the Society of Chemical Industry. Then, as now, I felt that pesticides were not the only factor causing the biodiversity crisis, but that agricultural intensification, habitat loss and habitat degradation were and are probably more to blame. In response to this quote in the media at the time:

“British Insects in Decline

Scientists are warning of a potential ecological disaster following the discovery that Britain has lost around 7% of its indigenous insect species in just under 100 years.

A comparison with figures collected in 1904 have revealed that around 400 species are now extinct, including the black-veined white butterfly, not seen since 1912, the Essex emerald moth and the short-haired bumblebee. Many others are endangered, including the large garden bumblebee, the Fen Raft spider, which is only to be found in a reserve on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, and the once common scarlet malachite beetle, now restricted to just three sites.

Changes to the insects’ natural habitats have been responsible for this disastrous decline in numbers. From housing and industrial developments to single-crop farming methods, Britain’s countryside has become increasingly inhospitable to its native insects.”

I chose to talk about “Forest and woodland insects: Down and out or on the up?” I used data from that most valuable of data sets, the Rothamsted Insect Survey to illustrate my hypothesis that those insects associated with trees were either doing better or not declining, because of increased tree planting over the last fifty years. As you can see from the slides from my talk, this does indeed seem to be the case with moths and aphids that feed on trees or live in their shade. I also showed that the populations of the same species in northern Britain, where agriculture is less intensive and forests and woodlands more prevalent were definitely on the up, and this phenomenon was not just confined to moths and aphids.

Two tree aphids, one Drepanosiphum platanoidis lives on sycamore, the other Elatobium abietinum, lives on spruce trees; both are doing rather well.

Two more tree-dwelling aphids, one on European lime, the other on sycamore and maples, both doing very well. For those of you unfamiliar with UK geography, East Craigs is in Scotland and Newcastle in the North East of England, Hereford in the middle and to the west, and Starcross in the South West, Sites 2, 1, 6 and 9 in the map in the preceding figure.

Two conifer feeding moth species showing no signs of decline.

On the up, two species, a beetle, Agrilus biguttatus perhaps due to climate change, and a butterfly, the Speckled Wood Pararge aegeria, due to habitat expansion and climate change?

It is important however, to remember that insect populations are not static, they vary from year to year, and the natural fluctuations in their populations can be large and, as in the case of the Orange ladybird, Halyzia sedecimguttata, take place over a several years, which is yet another reason that we need long-term data sets.

It is obvious, whether we believe that an ecological catastrophe is heading our way or not, that humans are having a marked effect on the biodiversity that keeps our planet in good working order and not just through our need to feed an ever-increasing population. A number of recent studies have shown that our fixation with car ownership is killing billions of insects every year (Skórka et al., 2013; Baxter-Gilbert et al.,2015; Keilsohn et al., 2018) and that our fear of the dark is putting insects and the animals that feed on them at risk (Eccard et al., 2018; Grubisic et al., 2018). We have a lot to answer for and this is exacerbated by our growing disconnect from Nature and the insidious effect of “shifting baselines” which mean that succeeding generations tend to accept what they see as normal (Leather & Quicke, 2010, Soga & Gaston, 2018) and highlights the very real need for robust long-term data to counteract this dangerous and potentially lethal, World view (Schuh, 2012; Soga & Gaston, 2018). Perhaps if research funding over the last thirty years or so had been targeted at the many million little things that run the World and not the handful of vertebrates that rely on them (Leather, 2009), we would not be in such a dangerous place?

I am, however, determined to remain hopeful. As a result of the article in The Observer, I received an email from a gentleman called Glyn Brown, who uses art to hopefully, do something about shifting baselines. This is his philosophy in his own words and pictures.

I think, that most, if not all entomologists, will confess to a bit of funding envy when talking with those of their colleagues who work with the “undeserving 3%”, the large charismatic mega-fauna and the modern dinosaurs. The terminology gives us away, although the evidence is overwhelmingly on our side (Leather, 2009). As entomologists, particularly those of us working in the field, we are used to reporting numbers collected in the tens of thousands (Ramsden et al., 2014 ), if not the hundreds of thousands (Missa et al., 2009) and even a short six-week study can result in the capture of thousands of ground beetles (Fuller, et al., 2008). Naming our subjects, much as we love them, is not an option, even if we wanted to. Even behavioural entomologists counting individual flower visits by pollinators are used to dealing with hundreds of individuals. In the laboratory, although numbers may be smaller, say tens, we still assign them alphanumeric codes rather than names, even though one might look forward to counting the number of eggs laid by the unusually fecund moth #17 or hope that aphid #23 will be dead this morning as she is becoming a pesky outlier for your mortality data 🙂

Our colleagues who work with mammals in the field, seem however to adopt a different strategy. It appears quite common for them to name their animals as the following examples from Twitter make clear.

Published data in McGraw et al., (2016) are from another study where the animals are not named.

Anthropomorphic judgement values

Anne being very involved with her cheetahs, although the paper (Hillborn et al., 2012) does not mention them by name.

Another example of subjects with names Hubel et al., 2016), but this time named in the paper.

Although in the description of methodology and results animals are referred to as subjects, the Table gives it away! (Allritz et al., 2016).

Another example of named subjects (Stoinski et al., 2003).

More named subjects (Dettmer & Fragaszy, 2000), but as these were captive the names almost certainly not chosen by the observers.

In this case (Blake et al., 2016), use no human-based names either in the methods or tables, so exemplary, although of course I have not seen their field note books 🙂

My concern, highlighted by these examples, is that by naming their study animals, the observers are anthropomorphising them and that this may lead them to inadvertently bias their observations. After all, the names have not been chosen at random, and thus could influence the behaviours noted (or ignored). I say ignored, because of two very specific examples, there are more, but I have these two to hand.

Victorians used birds as examples of good moral behaviour, erroneously believing them to be monogamous, probably because of seeing the way they fed their chicks cooperatively. Tim Birkhead (2000)* quotes the Reverend Frederick Morris who in 1853 preached “Be thou like the dunnock – the male and female impeccably faithful to each other,” and goes on to point out that despite a hundred years of ornithological science it was not until the late 1960s that the promiscuous behaviour of female birds was revealed, interestingly enough coinciding with the new moral code of the 1960s.

Descriptions of penguin homosexual behaviour and their penchant for acts of necrophilia so shocked George Levick’s publishers that they removed them from his 1915 report but printed them and privately distributed them to selected parties marked as “Not for Publication” (Russell et al., 2012). He also transcribed his descriptions of this ‘aberrant’ behaviour in Greek in his notebooks, presumably to make it less accessible.

AND NOW SOMETHING NEW for my blog, an embedded comment/riposte. I thought that it would be useful to get a response from someone who works on large charismatic mega-fauna and who names their subjects. Anne Hilborn, whom many of you will know from Twitter as @AnneWHilborn, has kindly agreed to reply to my comments. In the spirit of revealing any possible conflicts of interest I should say that I taught Anne when she was an Ecology MSc student at Silwood Park 🙂

Decades ago this might have gotten me jeered out of science, the assumption being that by naming my study animals I was anthropomorphizing them and that any conclusions I drew about their behavior would be suspect. Thankfully we (at least those of us who have the privilege of working on megafauna) have moved on a bit in our thinking and our ways of doing science.

There are two parts to Simon’s concern about naming study animals. One is that naming leads to anthropomorphization, the second is that the anthropomorphizing leads to biased science. I would argue that the naming of study animals doesn’t necessarily increase anthropomorphism. On the Serengeti Cheetah Project we don’t name cheetahs until they are independent from their mother (due to a high mortality rate). During my PhD fieldwork I spent a lot of time following a young male known as HON752MC (son of Strudel). Several months after I started my work he was named Boke. My interest in his behavior, my chagrin at his failures and happiness when he had a full belly didn’t change when he was named. Many of us get emotionally attached on some level to our study animals, whether they have names or numbers.

An interesting thing to ponder is that if naming does lead to anthropomorphizing, does it only happen when human names are used? What human characteristics am I likely to attach to cheetahs named Peanut, Muscat, Strudel, Fusili, or Chickpea?

As to whether anthropomorphism leads to biased science… it definitely can if, as Simon points out, certain behaviors are not recorded because they do not fit the image of the animal the researcher had in their head. I don’t have any data on this, but I suspect this is extremely rare now days. Almost all researchers have had extensive formal training and know the importance of standardized data collection. I study cheetah hunting behavior, and I record how long a cheetahs spends spend stalking, chasing, killing, and eating their prey. I record the number of animals in the herd they targeted, how many second the cheetah spends eating vs being vigilant, and at what time they leave the carcass. No matter my personal feelings or attachments to an individual cheetah, the same data gets recorded.

Research methods have advanced a lot in the past decades and we use standardized methodologies and statistics expressly to prevent bias in our results. Anthropomorphism is just one possible source of bias, others include wanting to prove a treasured hypothesis, the tendency to place plots in areas where you suspect you will get the best results, etc..

As Adriana Lowe (@adriana_lowe ) puts it “Basically, if you’ve got a good study design and do appropriate stats, you can romanticise the furry little buggers until the cows come home and it won’t have a massive effect on your work. Any over interpretation of results would get called out by reviewers when you try to publish anyway.”

Simon points out examples of people being shocked when birds didn’t follow the dictates of contemporary human morality. I would like to think that biologists no longer place human values on animals. I can admire hyenas because the females are bigger bodied and socially dominant to males, but that doesn’t mean I draw parallels or lessons from them to human society (not in the least because the females give birth through their elongated clitoris and the cubs practice siblicide). As scientists we are capable of compartmentalizing, of caring deeply for our subjects, of shedding a tear when Asti turns up with one cub when previously she had five, without that changing the way we record data. In our training as biologists, we are taught not impose our own feelings or values on our study animals. We may find infanticide in lions (Packer and Pusey 1983), extra pair copulations in birds and primates (Sheldon 1994, Reichard 1995), or siblicide in boobies (Anderson 1990) to be repugnant, but we record, analyze, and try to publish on the phenomenon all the same.

To go on the offensive, there are ways naming study animals actually improves data collection.

Again, Adriana Lowe “If you’re doing scan sampling for instance, so writing down all individuals in a certain area every 10 minutes or so, names help. At least for me, it’s harder to remember if someone is M1 or M2 than Janet or Bob, particularly if you have a big study troop/community. So it can improve the quality of the data collected if you’re less likely to make identification errors.”

Because of our own training and peer review, assigning emotions or speculating about the intent on animals rarely makes it into scientific papers. However the situation is very different for those of us who wish to present our results outside of the ivory tower. While fellow scientists might be willing to wade through dry descriptions about how M43 contact called 3 times in 4 minutes when he was no longer in visual contact with M44, the public is not. Effective science communication needs a story and an emotional hook to draw people in. It is much easier to do that when you tell a story about Bradley and Cooper and not M43 and M44. I will admit this does get into grey areas with the type of language we use outside of scientific papers. I tell stories about the cheetahs in my blog posts and even assign emotions to individuals. But if I am answering questions from the media or the public, I am still very careful not to make any definitive claims about behavior that haven’t been backed up by statistical analysis.

Here I use language and make assumption in tweets that I never would in a scientific paper.

There are a lot of issues that negatively affect the objectivity of science ie. the majority of funding going to well established entrenched researchers, papers being reviewed primarily by people from the same school of thought, the increasing pressure to have flashy results that generate headlines, but naming of study animals is not high on the list.

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So now, over to you the readers, what do you think? Please comment and share your views or at the very least, please cast your vote.

*note that Tim Birkhead also falls into the very trap that he describes by using the word promiscuous in the title of his book, a human judgemental term relating to moral behaviour, multiple mating would have been more appropriate.

I write about politics, nature + the environment. Some posts are serious, some not. These are my views, I don't do any promotional stuff and these views are not being expressed for anyone who employs me.

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